T-Mobile officially retired its 2G GSM network on August 3, 2026, marking the end of 2G service from all three major U.S. carriers. With AT&T having discontinued 2G in 2017 and Verizon following in 2020, devices that rely solely on the older standard—including the original 2007 iPhone — can no longer connect to any cellular network in the United States. The move also affects remaining smartphones, alarm systems, payment terminals, and other IoT devices still using 2G, though T-Mobile had given customers advance notice to upgrade or transition.
T-Mobile kept its 2G network active because it still had some legacy customers who were using it. Some customers visiting the United States and using international roaming carrier agreements for connectivity also needed 2G for voice calling, but T-Mobile worked with carriers globally to prepare for the end of its 2G network.
Customers who were still on T-Mobile’s 2G network were warned well ahead of time about the shutdown and given time to transition. Smartphones, alarm panels, payment terminals, and other IoT accessories that used 2G will no longer function.
AT&T ended support for 2G almost a decade ago in 2017, and Verizon stopped supporting 2G in 2020. Now that no carriers in the U.S. support 2G, legacy devices like the original iPhone will not be able to connect to any cellular network.
MacDailyNews Take: Time marches on!
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The post T-Mobile shuts down 2G network, ending U.S. cellular service for Apple’s original iPhone appeared first on MacDailyNews.
An exquisitely preserved specimen of Austronaga minuta, a small, long-necked marine reptile from the Triassic of China, contains a fossilized stomach, liver and intestines, offering paleontologists their oldest detailed glimpse yet of how early reptiles digested food.
The post 244-Million-Year-Old Fossil Preserves Earliest Reptilian Digestive System appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
The 13-sided tile that solved a half-century-old math problem, discovered by an amateur mathematician at his kitchen table in 2022, turns out to bend light into a twisting pinwheel unlike anything produced by an ordinary crystal, according to a new study in Nature Communications.
The work, from physicists at the University of Tokyo and NTT’s Nanophotonics Center in Japan, marks the first time anyone has taken the celebrated “einstein” tile—a term derived from the German ein Stein, meaning “one stone,” and unrelated to the famous physicist—out of pure mathematics and asked what it does to light.
The answer is a form of optical handedness that even quasicrystals, the closest known relatives of this structure, do not possess.
Unlike circles or squares, which are identical when mirrored, our hands are not. They may be reflections of each other, but you can’t place one perfectly on top of the other, no matter how you rotate it. Likewise, a handed structure “notices” the difference between left- and right-circularly polarized light, while a mirror-symmetric structure—such as a circle—cannot. The flat tile pattern has no mirror image identical to itself, much like your hands, and that asymmetry becomes imprinted onto the light it diffracts.
“We found that the diffraction patterns themselves become chiral because the structure lacks mirror symmetry,” Masaya Notomi, the study’s senior author, explained in a press statement. “This kind of optical response is fundamentally different from that observed in conventional quasicrystalline materials.”
To see why that matters, it helps to go back to the shape.
Mathematicians had pursued a particular puzzle for roughly 50 years, known as the “Einstein problem.” The question was whether a single shape could completely tile a flat plane, but only in a pattern that never repeats. Roger Penrose reduced the problem to two tiles in the 1970s. Finding a single tile remained out of reach.
Then, in November 2022, David Smith, an amateur mathematician and retired print technician from Bridlington, England, found one while tinkering with shape-tiling software. He cut copies out of cardstock, laid them across his table, and watched the pattern refuse to settle. He nicknamed it “the hat” because it looks vaguely like a fedora. Smith and three collaborators posted the proof in March 2023, and it made news around the world.
That same year, a 2023 theory paper by physicist Joshua Socolar had already predicted chiral diffraction from hat tilings, but there was one wrinkle. The hat needs its own mirror image sprinkled among the tiles to work, a hint of handedness baked into the geometry. That handedness is exactly what the new study chases into the behavior of light, so to do it, the team led by Yuto Moritake did something a mathematician would never bother with: they built the thing.
They marked the center of each hat tile with a point, producing a pattern with perfect threefold rotational symmetry (it looks identical when you turn it a third of the way around) but no mirror symmetry, meaning its reflection is a genuinely different object. Then they etched that pattern into a 350-nanometer-thick film of silicon nitride, drilling 372,100 tiny holes across a patch half a millimeter on a side.
Shine a laser through a regular grid of holes, and you get a neat, symmetric spray of dots on the far wall—a diffraction pattern, the same effect that throws rainbows off a CD. The team fired a green laser at their aperiodic version and photographed what came out.
It was a pinwheel.
The diffraction pattern was sharp and filled with bright, well-defined spots—the signature of long-range order—and evidence that the structure behaves like a true quasicrystal despite never repeating. But unlike conventional diffraction patterns, the entire arrangement twisted in one direction, with no mirror symmetry anywhere in the image. When the researchers repeated the experiment using the mirror-image version of the tile, the pinwheel twisted in the opposite direction.
So the team did what all scientists do in these situations. They just started blasting different kinds of light at it.
“Because the structure is chiral, a circular-polarization dependence should not be forbidden. But on the first trial, I couldn’t find any difference. I thought it might be very weak, so I changed the camera to a more sensitive one — and then I finally found it,” Moritake told The Debrief. “I somehow expected it, but I was still surprised when I found it.”
The strange result came with that circularly polarized light test. It’s a light whose electric field corkscrews as it travels, clockwise or counterclockwise. The pattern responded differently depending on which way the light was spinning. Feed it left-handed light and certain spots brightened; feed it right-handed light and different ones did. That behavior, the authors note, has never been seen in a conventional quasicrystal.
Underneath all of it sits a piece of elegant bookkeeping. The angle of the pinwheel’s twist, about 15.5 degrees, isn’t arbitrary. Moritake’s team showed that it falls straight out of the Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio, the same numbers that govern the tile’s geometry. The shape’s real-world twist is written directly into how it scatters light.
The findings are a scientific first, but the paper is quick to point out that this is fundamental physics and not a product. There is no device here, and the authors are careful to call their structure a possible “platform” rather than a working component. The chirality at play is a strictly two-dimensional kind (the absence of a mirror line within the flat pattern), not the three-dimensional handedness of a molecule or, you know, your hands.
“At least, this effect is forbidden in an inversion-symmetric structure, so it reflects the chiral nature of the monotile,” Moritake said. “Of course, this effect could appear in other structures too. But I don’t know of another lattice that is both chiral and quasiperiodic like this one.”
Still, the result does something basic research quietly does all the time: it takes an object discovered for no reason beyond that it was beautiful and finds that nature had a use for it. Breaking a structure’s mirror symmetry is how physicists coax materials into nonlinear optical tricks and polarization-sensitive behavior, and aperiodic tiles offer a new and largely unexplored way in.
“Mathematical discoveries have always led to important developments in physics,” Moritake said. “The monotile is generated from a honeycomb frame, and in nanophotonics, the honeycomb lattice is used constantly because it produces interesting phenomena — graphene is the representative example. So I thought the monotile lattice might be interesting in real physics too.”
For a shape that started as a puzzle on a hobbyist’s kitchen table, that’s a long way to travel.
MJ Banias is a co-founder of The Debrief, covering science and technology news. You can email him at mj@thedebrief.org or follow him on LinkedIn.
Chinese smartphone makers have been followers in the global market, embracing the concepts and paradigms set in the past 20 years by Apple and Google. But AI may be giving the Chinese an opportunity to break away and set their own path forward.
Specifically, Chinese companies are integrating AI more fully into smartphones, and also using AI for limited robotics in phones. Here’s what you need to know about these emerging trends.
China’s ZTE recently showed its Nubia NaviX Ultra. The phone runs ByteDance’s Doubao AI agent, which users can access with voice commands or by pressing a button on the phone. The phone has no home screen and no conventional app store.
Another Chinese company, called StepFun — it was founded in 2023 by Jiang Daxin, a former Microsoft vice president and chief scientist at Microsoft’s Software Technology Center Asia — sells a phone called the StepX Neo. It runs a proprietary operating system called Step AOS based on Android, Linux, and an RTOS containing a built-in AI agent called Step Amoo. The StepX Neo splits phone functions into four primitives (communication, apps, files, system tools) that the agent recombines based on the stated goals of the user.
Honor, a phone maker spun off from Huawei, has an AI agent the company built with input from Alibaba called the YOYO Intelligent Agent. It ships on Honor’s entire MagicOS 10-eligible lineup.
Note: an American company is enabling this. All three phones use Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) to give system-level access to the agents.
None of these phones will become available in the United States. ZTE is banned from the US by the FCC over national-security concerns, while the StepFun and Honor phones are built for the Chinese market with no US version planned.
All modern smartphones can run AI. By simply visiting the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store, anyone can download dozens of AI apps, including those offered by the frontier model companies. Or they can use the AI services and tools built in to phones by Apple and Google.
What’s different about the new agentic AI phones in China is that the operating system itself has an agentic AI layer that enables it to function across apps and instead of apps.
While agentic AI phones represent a minority of the current market, they feel like the future. And that future is consequential. First, it’s a another step toward independence from Android. Google’s services layer is already gone from China. Now the Android app layer is being replaced by vertically integrated agent stacks owned by Chinese super-app companies.
Despite building agentic features that cross app boundaries to a limited degree, Apple and Google are unlikely to allow third-party agents to replace the app layer of their mobile OSs anytime soon.
Apple takes 15% to 30% of app revenue. And (according to an estimate introduced during the Epic v. Apple/Google litigation but not confirmed by Google), the Play Store has historically accounted for somewhere between 17% and 26% of Google’s operating income. The entire economic logic of iOS and Android depends on apps. An agentic layer that dissolves those apps into tasks isn’t something either company wants to think about. The Chinese OEMs can blow up the app model because they had no stake in it.
Meanwhile, the AI trend is suffocating mobile app in-app purchases, which dropped by roughly 40% by early 2026, even as people pay more for those purchases compared to a few years ago (because they’re dominated by subscriptions to AI and vibe-coded apps). In other words, even inside the app stores, there’s a shift from the old app model to AI replacements.
AI is not only changing the software model, but the hardware model, too.
Another categorical way China is splitting off from the global smartphone concept is the nascent market of robot phones. A robot phone is one that uses AI to control physical robotic components on an actual phone.
The leading contender in this field is a device called the Honor Robot Phone, which I wrote about in March. A leaked unboxing video of the Honor Robot Phone appeared this week on the Chinese social network Weibo.
The robotic element is a gimbal with a 200-megapixel camera on it. One basic use is that the phone can remain stationary while propped up on a table or clamped to a tripod, while the camera tracks a moving subject using AI. Another use is to walk while using it and let the gimbal smooth out the jiggling and movement. Software on the phone also enables automated cinematic special effects.
But the real leap forward is in “self expression” for the phone. The Honor Robot Phone exhibits subtle Attachment Economy features. It shakes its “head” no and nods yes. And it can do a “backflip” to “cheer you up.” The phone gets a personality.
Honor plans to launch the phone on Aug. 12 in China.
So-called “robot phones” are even more rare in China than agentic AI phones. Still, the Honor Robot Phone represents another Chinese departure from the Silicon Valley smartphone hardware model of a static pane of glass. The Honor Robot Phone has a body. It feels like the future, too, as it’s one of the rare products in the emerging Attachment Economy, where humanlike attributes (in this case, gestures and body language) are deployed to make the consumer more “attached” to devices that seem like they have thoughts and feelings.
As the Chinese smartphone market splits off from the American one, it presents an alternative for the world. Because if the agentic AI phones succeed in China, they’ll almost certainly be offered internationally.
That represents not only hardware sales, but the penetration of Chinese super-apps, Chinese financial services, Chinese AI-based information (and along with it, the Chinese government’s world view, we can expect).
The only question is: Will the world prefer the Chinese agentic AI approach or the US AI app model?
Adding to the complexity is the coming wave of AI wearables, most of which will likely be wirelessly “tethered” to smartphones that provide intelligence and connectivity. Soon, we’ll be conversing with our glasses and watches. Our glasses and watches will be “conversing” with our phones. And our phones will be conversing with AI models that represent the values, beliefs and biases of their creators.
The Chinese agentic AI movement represents a split in how phones work and how the people worldwide interact with information, technology and each other.
AI disclosures: This article is 100% human-written by the author, Mike Elgan. Some research, ideation, and fact- and grammar-checking was performed using AI tools.
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